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Maverick Melissa

Etheridge's Unconventional Life Adds A Slice Of Stridency To Her Arena-rock Recklessness

October 11, 1996|By Greg Kot.

While the blues is frequently cited as the mother of rock 'n' roll, country music has an equally seminal if less publicly celebrated role in rock's development. Exhibit A is Hank Williams Sr., whose death at age 29 on Jan. 1, 1953, preceded the dawn of the rock 'n' roll era by a year. But Williams' brief recording career was a watershed in the development of popular music.

Williams was a rebel who initially terrified the Grand Old Opry. He was eventually accepted there, but subsequently was fired for his erratic pill-popping and booze-swilling behavior, a symptom of a painful spinal injury and a devastating marriage that ended in divorce. Those traumas filtered into Williams' music with very little editing. Even his biggest hits were tinged with a palpable sadness that defined the "high-lonesome" sound, which would entrance and influence performers from Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis to Bruce Springsteen and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ronnie Van Zant.

Williams' immense legacy remains well-documented on a continuing stream of CDs released by Mercury/Nashville, most recently "The Legend of Hank Williams" and "Low Down Blues."

"The Legend" is an audio book interspersing music with excerpts from Colin Escott's authoritative Williams biography. "Low Down Blues" focuses on some of the singer's most lacerating material. While not exactly blues in form, Williams' singing is imbued with its passion. He would frequently break off lines with a falsetto yodel that conveyed an inconsolable recognition of just how painful life could be. "No matter how I struggle and strive, I'll never get out of this world alive," Williams sang, and every note of his music seemed to be recorded with that terrible knowledge.